


A Simple Matter of Marcie

by Deejaymil



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Babysitting, Gen, Love Potion/Spell, Magic Tricks, Prompt Fill, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-21
Updated: 2015-10-21
Packaged: 2018-04-27 10:51:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5045497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deejaymil/pseuds/Deejaymil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spencer had expected babysitting Henry to go smoothly. After all, what could one seven year old do that a seasoned FBI agent couldn't handle? He'd been ready for anything.</p>
<p>Anything except Henry's new friend, Marcie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Simple Matter of Marcie

**Author's Note:**

> Training in behavioural psychology and profiling wasn’t exact needed to recognise the tell-tale signs of stress on JJ’s face when she greeted him at her front door with a wry smile that pinched her eyes tight at the corners and a taut, “Oh god, Spence, I meant to call...”

Reid paused on the threshold and fixed her with a nervous grin. “I’m early, I know. Sorry.” Humour. An attempt at levity. “You know me. Punctual.” It was an automatic response he slipped into easily as he worked on deducing the reason behind those worried blue eyes. An automatic response that proved unneeded as galloping footsteps and the shrill parrot-like chatter of children echoed from JJ’s narrow hall. Children, plural. Reid hadn’t been awarded four PHDs without first mastering basic addition.

JJ’s gaze flickered back and returned accompanied by a sheepish grin that was more at home on his face than hers. “I forgot that Henry had a playdate today, and I can’t ask you to babysit a kid you don’t know. I’ll have to cancel lunch, but it’s no problem, Spence. I’m sorry for being a bother.”

It was only a second of rapid-fire thought to consider every statistical probability that would be likely to occur while responsible for two seven-year-old boys for five hours. Another second to run that against the effect of added stress on JJ if she abstained from this chance to relax. The outcome was clear: “I can do it,” he said with confidence, wishing that his voice hadn’t taken on quite the pitch that it had as he’d done so. “What could possibly go wrong?”

_Household accidents are the number one cause of death in prepubescent—_ his mind began, but he grinned wider in order to drown it out.

JJ raised her eyebrows, affixed an expression on her face that was terrifyingly like Prentiss’s, and stepped aside to reveal a Henry overcome with excitement at seeing his favourite ‘Uncle’ and—

“Uh,” Reid managed. That was sure a whole lot of pink for one small person.

“Her name is Marcie. She likes digging, princesses, and Henry.” JJ looked way too amused to be as sorry as she was trying to convince him she was. “Marcie, this is Spencer.”

“Are you a librarian?” Marcie demanded, also pulling a face that was startlingly like Prentiss. “Are you allowed out of the library? Are you gonna get arrested? I think you should be arrested.”

Oh boy.

 

* * *

 

Lunch was disappointingly pedestrian. He carefully sliced the crusts from two ham and cheese sandwiches and considered that maybe his idea of appropriate lunch selections may have been a little warped by his upbringing. He’d been responsible for so many of his own meals growing up that he’d gained a sort of eccentric taste in food. Ham and cheese was nothing next to peanut butter and cereal sandwiches.

However, Marcie had requested that neither sandwich have “one iota of crust” left on the bread, and since Reid had been too enthralled by her use of the word ‘iota’ to extoll the positive properties of the crust (there weren’t any that had notable empirical evidence, but JJ had assured him of the importance of doing so), he was being especially vigilant about it. Vigilant enough that it had managed to escape his notice that the house had suddenly become _very_ quiet.

Reid paused, the knife skipping along the cutting board and slicing the soft bread into a slightly wonky triangle that Henry was sure to comment on. Sometimes, Reid wondered if JJ asked him to babysit so much as penance for the pedantic habits that he kept passing along to her son. She’d taken Henry’s decision to start wearing odd socks in stride; not so much his new obsession with right angles. Reid, on the other hand, couldn’t be prouder. The magic of math needed to be impressed early in order to avoid math anxiety in the middle years student. Math pondering aside, he needed to find out why the children were no longer audibly childrening. Padding his way upstairs to the bedrooms, he found two blonde heads bent over a bowl of milky-pink gloop centred on Henry’s planet-bedecked rug.

“What is that?” Reid asked, interest piqued as he tilted his head and examined the bowl that Marcie was stirring with one of Henry’s plastic fire-trucks. Henry startled and guiltily shifted his arm to hide a large pink stain on the rug. “Nuthin’,” he stated with a forced innocence that had the corner of Reid’s mouth twitching. Oh, if only all their suspects were so easy to profile.

“It’s a love potion,” announced Marcie, jutting out her chin into a stubborn smirk. “To make Henry fall in love with me.”

Reid blinked at her, completely lost. Was this a thing that all girls did?

“Okay,” he said slowly. “Don’t… don’t drink that.” Marcie’s mouth did a thing which suggested that if Reid left them in the room, the contents of the bowl would be on and in Henry before either of them could sneeze. “It… it won’t work without magic.”

JJ really owed him for this one.

Marcie’s eyes widened. “Magic isn’t real.”

“Yes it is,” Henry disagreed. “Uncle Spence does magic all the time.” He picked up the bowl with hands that wobbled, the gloop glooping about gloopily and threatening to add to the widening stain under his knee. Eyes skimming the mess, Reid took the bowl quickly and added the rug to the ‘will deal with before JJ gets home’ mental checklist.

“If you come eat your sandwiches, I’ll show you real magic,” he offered nonchalantly, hoping the bored tone would suggest that he did magic as a daily thing. It seemed to work. The two children rocketed up and bolted down the hall, bouncing off the walls in their excitement to eat the crustless abominations he’d left on the counter. As soon as they were out of sight, Reid awkwardly walked the bowl of gunk to the bathroom sink and tipped it in, reaching for his cell as soon as his hands were free.

“Princess of Perpetual Pedantry,” Garcia answered cheerily. “What can I do you for, Sweet-cake?”

“Did you ever make love potions?”

There was a startled silence on the other end of the phone. “Honey, you know they aren’t real things, right? I know Harry Potter was very, very convincing but what have we told you about believing everything you read?”

“I’m babysitting,” Reid cut in. “Henry has a friend over and she made a love potion out of… shampoo and food colouring, I think. And maybe salt. To make Henry love her. Is this something girls do?” He left the unspoken ‘please help me’ hang in the air, knowing Garcia would pick up on it with her usual quickness.

“Only the cool ones.” Garcia sounded impressed. “How old is this kid?”

“Seven. Her name is Marcie, and she likes digging and princesses.” He stuck his head out of the bathroom and listened for appropriate ‘Henry and Marcie not being naughty’ noises. Giggles and the clattering sound of a plastic plate hitting the table echoed reassuringly back at him from downstairs. Behind him, the sink gurgled dangerously. He chose practised avoidance as a response to _that_ and stepped out of the room, closing the door behind him without looking back. “She’s wearing, by my last count, eight different shades of pink.”

“Oh dear. I bet that’s hard for you.” A snuffling sound from the other end of the line had him frowning at the phone. She was laughing at him and trying to hide it. “Indulge them. Make a better love potion.”

“You said that they’re not real.” Was his voice whining? He suspected his voice was whining. Oops. And the kitchen had gone quiet.

“You have a _lot_ to learn about girls, little genius. Now go have fun. Ciao.” She hung up on him, leaving him just as out of his depth as before. Were all the women in his life conspiring against him?

 

* * *

 

“I don’t like potatoes.” The obstinate chin jut was back on Marcie’s face. Reid made a mental note to stress to JJ the importance of having only sons.

“I’m not asking you to eat it,” Reid stated, holding up the offending vegetable up by the straw he’d ‘magically’ stabbed through it. “Just to appreciate the skill it took to put a straw through a dense surface such as the skin of this potato.”

Two sets of unimpressed eyes met his. “Boring,” Marcie announced. Henry nodded in agreement, eyes flickering from his friend back to Reid.

Reid wasn’t very good at girls or talking to people or anything that didn’t involve academia or profiling, but he didn’t have to be to see that maybe Marcie didn’t need a love potion to charm Henry. “You’re bossy,” he told the girl with a frown. Henry giggled at the shocked expression on Marcie’s face.

“You can’t call me bossy, you’re an adult. You have to be _nice_.”

“Yes I can, and no I don’t.” Reid lifted his trousers slightly, exposing his mismatched socks. “I have odd socks. Adults don’t have odd socks. So I can be rude if I want to.” He poked his tongue out for added emphasis. Marcie laughed, Henry joining her a moment later after careful consideration. He was going to be a heartbreaker when he was older, he already had the knack of mirroring. Unconscious flirtation came naturally to him. Reid stopped that trail of thought before he ended up being slightly jealous of a seven-year-old’s ‘game’.

“He can make tornadoes in a bottle,” Henry pointed out. “That’s not boring.”

Reid found up JJ’s lemon-scented dishwashing liquid and a bottle of water, brandished them both. “Weather at will!” he proclaimed. “Chemistry magic!” He poured a little of the liquid into the water bottle and spun it energetically, showing it to them as a funnel formed in the middle.

Marcie narrowed her eyes at the bottle. “Alright, not boring,” she agreed. “But can we make love potions now?”

The girl was _obsessed_. Clinically fixated. What else did girls like?

“Do you like rainbows?” he asked desperately, reaching.

Henry pulled a face, clearly not quite invested enough to follow them down that path. “I’m thirsty,” he told Reid firmly. Reid was pleased and a little proud. Diverting attention away from the boring option and towards one that was more scientifically fulfilling. Henry was a fast learner.

_Ah!_

“Do you want to see a real love potion?” he asked them both, observing them sit upright in their chairs and stare him intently, waiting.

“Yes!” Marcie cried. “I told you they were real,” she added, as a quieter aside to Henry.

Reid rifled through the pantry, knowing that what he wanted was in there somewhere, hidden behind the healthy snacks and sensible meal options. Ah, there. He flourished the Nutella container. “Chocolate!”

Henry’s eyebrows bunched together in a look more at home on Hotch’s face than JJ’s son. “That’s not a potion.” He sounded betrayed.

Marcie kicked him under the table. “Shh, or we won’t get any,” she warned him.

Reid was already working, grabbing a saucepan out and measuring the Nutella into the pan. “It will be,” he instructed, adding milk. Ten minutes of clattering around and Reid had placed two frothy hot chocolates in front of the children, complete with a handful of colourful sugared cereal that JJ would flip if she knew he’d brought with him. “Love potions,” he told them, sipping his own and deliberately leaving a milky line across his upper lip for them to giggle at. “Chocolate releases the chemical dopamine from the brain, which gives you the feeling of being in love. More chemistry magic!” Marcie beamed at Henry who grinned back with his hair in his eyes and his cheeks and the bridge of his nose flushing red.

Maybe girls weren’t so bad after all.

 

* * *

 

“Bye Uncle Spence,” Henry said, throwing his arms around Reid and leaving a milky trace on his cheek as he kissed him. “I had fun!”

“Even making silly love potions?” Reid asked, unwinding sticky arms and ruffling the blonde head still trying to hug him, only armlessly now.

Henry blushed again. “I only did that to make Marcie happy. She’s weird like that. She’s my friend, I don’t need chocolate to love her.”

JJ made strangled kind of noise that meant she was either overcome with emotion or that she’d just stubbed her toe, and pulled Henry away from Reid and into an awkward one armed hug. “Thanks for today, Spence,” she said, eyes glittering. “Although, one day you’ll have to tell me what happened to the rug in Henry’s room.”

Reid shrugged, winding his scarf around his neck and dramatically stepping out the door. He winked, flourishing his arm and calling back, “Why, magic, of course!”

**Author's Note:**

> **Edited August, 2017.**


End file.
